Chapter Text
That night, she becomes the water. At first, she’s bending like she usually does, like it’s written into her muscles: curve, up, twist, straighten, down, push, and curve again, and the waves follow her movements so precisely that she begins to wonder if she is manipulating them or if the ocean is bending her. They become their own cycle—Katara and the ocean, the ocean and Katara for one more night.
It’s not like she’s giving it up forever, she keeps telling herself. Just around other people. She’s done it before. It won’t be so bad—they’ll leave the city soon enough, and then she’ll have all the time left in the world to feel the tides again. Not that that’s very much time, but still.
Zuko comes up at the break of sunrise. She keeps working the waves as he runs through his routine morning forms, sending fire blasting periodically up towards the sun as he jumps and spins across the deck. He keeps pausing to shake his hair impatiently out of his bad eye. It breaks up the flow of his movements. Not necessarily a bad thing, Katara reasons. At least this will stop him from seeming too well-trained.
He makes breakfast, too, before she can say anything about it, and it’s not even bad. He must remember her complaints from last time, because the food is bland, but not spicy like it had been the last time he tried to cook. Katara doesn’t mention it, but when she scrapes her spoon along the rim of the bowl before pushing it away, he ducks his head and grins.
Then he takes the wheel, and for lack of anything else to do, Katara goes below deck to sleep. Zuko has left the single bed neatly made. The corner of the blanket is folded down and the pillow is punched into shape. She slides between the covers and tries not to think about how they smell like a combination of musty spices and smoke that makes her nose itch.
At least the nightmares aren’t so bad this time.
When she finds herself in the thin bunk again, the air is marginally cooler and significantly staler. Nighttime. She’d slept all day. Huh, Katara thinks, and sits up slowly. For the first time in a while, the blood doesn’t rush from her head and leave her dizzy. She feels satiated.
Must be the sea air. It must remind her of home.
She sneezes three times on the way up the stairs, but the scent of smoke still lingers at the back of her throat.
Zuko is standing straight-backed at the pillar, both hands on the wheel, his hair blowing back in the breeze. When her sandals hit the deck, he says “good morning.”
“Tone it down, Mr. Sarcasm,” she retorts. She tugs an empty crate over to where he stands and sits down, folding her legs beneath her. “Where are we?”
“The ocean.”
Katara groans, and Zuko chuckles low in his throat. “No, seriously. Do you know how much farther we have?”
“Not a clue. There aren’t any landmarks out here. I’m just using the sun for direction.”
“What about when it goes down?”
Zuko glances at her out of the corner of his eye. “You rise with the moon, don’t you?”
-
Sometime before dawn, Zuko is jolted awake when his head hits the floor.
It takes precious seconds for his vision to clear and the dancing stars to fade from the inside of his eyelids, during which the ship rocks two more times and pitches everything below deck not secured to a wall or the floor to the left. He rolls into a pile of fishing nets. They tangle around his legs, and he kicks ineffectually, but all it does is wrap them tighter.
There is something very wrong.
He knows by now what Katara’s waves feel like. They are rhythmic, always even, each one the same size and shape and frequency, and none of them are big enough to tip the ship nearly sideways. These are not her waves.
Frustrated, he gives up on kicking and sears through the nets on either side of him before scrambling to his feet. It’s a battle to get to the stairs. Beneath him, the floor seems intent on throwing him into the air or back on the bed. It’s all he can do to snatch his satchel and sword with one hand and one of the rungs of the ladder with the other.
The first thing he notices on deck is how black everything is. It’s not dark—dark can be calm, dark can be the stars and the moon. This is black. Black storm clouds, black roaring waves, black slick wood. And a solitary blinding crack in the void—lightning.
At first, he can’t see Katara anywhere. Panic rises up in his throat. There is water gushing over the rail, but all he can think is that she is not at the stern where she always is, that there is no blue on all the deafening black and Katara is gone.
He screams her name. The water swallows it up as soon as it leaves his lips. It’s lost among the crash and boom and hiss of the tempest. He screams it again, and then again, until his throat is raw and the three syllables ring against the storm: KA-TAR-A.
The deck slides, and his feet go sideways. His desperate fingers catch hold of the mast. It’s so slick that he can barely keep hold. Then there’s a flash of something that isn’t white. He strains his eyes—
She is poised on the slim piece of wood jutting from the front edge of the ship, arms flung outwards as if preparing for an embrace. Her soaking hair streams backwards. Against the colorless sky she is a vision. A powerless spirit.
A wave catches the side of the boat. They lurch to the left. Zuko hugs the mast, and Katara staggers, losing her balance. One foot lands inches to the left of the place the wood ends.
She falls.
Zuko flings himself forwards, shrieking words he doesn’t understand. The ship rights itself but she is not there.
The steering column careens by, the wheel twisting back and forth without direction, and he makes a snatch for it. The polished spoke breaks off in his hand. He hits the bow feet-first. He’s barely pulled himself to his knees when a wall of seawater tumbles over him and for a moment, he loses everything else, his lungs screaming agony into his brain.
He ignores it.
The piece of wood at the front of the ship is thin and jagged. Katara told him it was for ramming and splitting ice floes. It’s just small enough for him to encircle it with his arms. He inches out bit by bit, pulling himself farther until his entire body is wrapped around it, clinging with every bit of energy he has left.
“Katara!”
She is not gone. She’s the most powerful waterbender Zuko has ever met. She is not gone, any moment now she will shoot out of the blackness and disperse the storm with a flick of her wrist because she is Katara and she rises with the moon and this is her element.
Katara cannot drown.
His arms are trembling from hugging the plank. There is a fierce angry roar in his muscles telling him to just let go but he reaches out and pulls until he is hanging over the waves with nothing below him but miles of angry ocean.
He sees her hand.
It is clutching the very slimmest part of the plank. Brown fingers turn white with exertion. Every single vein in his body is telling him to give up but he sees her hand.
“Katara,” he yells again, and this time he hears it, faint against the backdrop of the ocean spirits’ rage:
“Zuko.”
He loosens his limbs just enough that his body pitches over and he is swinging upside down from the plank, and then he pulls himself forwards with his chafed raw knees until he can see her whole body dangling from one thin wrist above the gaping maw of black.
“Hold on!” he shouts. She shakes her head wildly at him. Her eyes are rolling, pupils blown wide against the whites: she is terrified. Her mouth moves. He can make out the words “go back.”
He grits his teeth.
Every inch is an individual battle fought against the wind tearing at his body. Overhead, thunder cracks; lightning sizzles against the waves. Katara’s fingers slip infinitesimally. He fights harder.
Then she is close enough that he can see the way the fingers of her free hand twitch, and how the water beneath her fails to respond aside from the smallest of splashes. He can see the way her now-short hair is matted to her forehead.
His fingers close over her wrist.
“Zuko, go back!” she shrieks. “You’re going to die!”
“So are you!”
“I’m a waterbender, you complete idiot!”
“Then why don’t you do something?”
“I am!” she shouts, and with considerable effort, jerks her free arm up. The water beneath them surges and falls flat.
“That’s not—“
“Just go back, Zuko!”
“I’m not abandoning you!”
She opens her mouth to respond, but at that moment, another wave crashes over the both of them and he feels her fingers slip. He clutches them so tight he thinks he might break her hand but the only thing keeping her from tumbling down is him but she is heavy and his arm shoots out and now he can only hold the ship with three limbs threatening mutiny against his brain at any second.
“Let me go.” Her eyes flash with something worse than anger or hate. Resignation.
“That wasn’t the deal,” Zuko says.
Then his grip finally gives out, and they plunge into the arms of the ocean.